Mozcon 2015: Matthew Brown

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammer to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast=paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Matthew Brown from Moz takes the stage next continuing the chat about content. He starts chatting about SEOs wanting content and then hearing “create great content” which is not helpful. He talks about it being a joint efforts and I appreciate the note of it not being Field Of Dreams. You want good content but there’s lots of great content that will never be seen. SEO is critical.

Now stats: 25% of traffic comes from Facebook (1.3M shares/min) The only other network on the radar is Pinterest

79% of marketers are reporting that organization are shifting to branded content and it’s working.

NYT and NPR both had massive shares on sponsored posts (to the tune of 55% of shares).

That said, we have to avoid content fatigue. The cutoff is 1000 pieces of content per day. Google is trying to help trim this.

Google wants to help users find te quality and intent to help their visitors find what they want faster. Panda and

Penguin are there.

How do you develop content:

Example – Wait But Why Long form content that answers great questions. A lot of work but high quality.

At Moz they find targeting personas works well. The cheat sheet (which I had posted on my wall) is an excellent example. It’s link and social bait.

He’s now on to 10x evergreen content. That is content that’s 10x better than anything else on the site. The Beginners Guide to SEO is the example there. Evergreen content that requires a LOT of work but is difficult for a competitor to duplicate and as firts in, they likely can’ at all.

Now the question – how do you stand out? You have to be different.

The NYT posted a piece about “you” that used IPs to tell you by demographic where you shodl live and what you should do.

People went nuts over it and loved it and shared the heck out of it.

Blumberg did a similar thing but by using 90s style video game graphics to make the content more palatable and some simple graphic effects.

Both companies just broken the article template.

Linkable assets are an SEOs key. Looking at referrer data by region can help you get an idea of what conten is interesting to which regions (good idea).

Like Kristina he talks about actually removing page elemns to insure all device experiences work and work similarly.

A big question to answer is … what is the goal?

You need to define the distribution channel and the success metrics. He agrees that social shares is a small segment of the picture. Network diffusion s how we need to look at things. It drives Buzzfeeds traffic and they’ve run massive experiments.

He hits on a key point to me – social shares aren’t an SEO function but social shares drive links.

He also mentions that it’s key to push specific content to specific mediums to avoid tiring the audience. Don’t put your automotive copy out on your fashion channels. Keep it focused and measured.

The median lifespan of an article is 2.6 days and then drops.

Only 11% of visitors are loyal. That’s the key metric to change. You can actually measure the types of copy and the number of times that a visitor needs to come back to be an avid visitor. This will differ site by site but looking at the pages visited by these users can be crucial. A great point for publishers. This can be the length of he page, the amount of copy above the fold, etc. It can of course be specific content types. Unfortunately it can take 12 to 17 months to pull enough data. Anything less and you won’t know whether something works or not.

Buzzsumo is a recommended tool for monitoring social content. I’ve used ahrefs for similar purposes but no quite as elegantly presented. It displays social shares by content.

Moz Content is launching with a beta for attendees (sorry folks). It does a deep analysis on site pages breaking down data by content types and other attributes to get a feel for what content types are working for wich audiences and purposes. The screenshot was too quick to get a pic of for you bu it looks pretty slick and I’m looking forward to using it. You can expect a review on our blog soon.

Further, it will extrapolate from other sites what types of content will work best for you. It’s only available for 3 weeks starting now.

During Q&A he talks about a critical point I see fail a lot – content development without a full deployment strategy. He talks about spending as much time buildign the audience as you are putting out the content. I’m going to call a spade-a-spade … this is a point I myself often fail a on our own site (cobbler has no shoes) but will be revisiting.